UK’s Oldest Daily Newspaper Apparently First Stop On Clearview’s Reputational Rehab Tour
Clearview has suffered tons of self-inflicted damage during its relatively short life as a viable, if execrable, product.
Always willing to put its worst foot forward, the company built an AI backbone to support its voluminous webscraping, gathering up everything that wasn't locked down on the internet and applying its facial recognition algorithm to it.
While seeking funding, it handed out demo access to indiscriminate billionaires, indiscriminate private companies, and indiscriminate cops, encouraging all of them to perform searches on anyone and everyone to demonstrate the AI's ability to pull up a plethora of scraped data related to whatever face users uploaded.
Once it felt it had enough to work with, it started seeking customers. All the while, its database of scraped images and data has continued to grow, far outpacing internal ethics policies and Clearview's ability to tell the truth.
After a few solid years of negative press, Clearview kind of fell off the radar. Now, it's back. And it's apparently trying to rehabilitate its image by presenting its product (and CEO, Hoan Ton-That) as non-nefarious and potentially utilitarian.
Coming along for the ride is the UK's oldest national daily newspaper," which has provided Clearview some prime space in its most recent Sunday Times issue. The interview of Hoan Ton-That, performed by reporter Hannah Martin, opens with the CEO giving her the chance to search herself using his product - something that results in cautionary language that generates a lot of tough questions that simply aren't asked of Clearview's CEO for the remainder of the piece. (It also features an unbearably terrible headline - You don't know this face-scanning firm, but it knows you" - that ignores the wealth of information already made public by other journalists, most notably Kashmir Hill of the New York Times, who was the first to ensure the public would know this face-scanning firm.")
It's an uncanny experience, seeing myself, over the years, in online photographs I often didn't know were being taken. It's not hard to see why so many people worry that facial recognition technology could send anonymity the same way as landline phones and VCR players. At the moment Clearview AI is only accessible to government agencies in a limited number of jurisdictions (though this was not always the case - and more on that later). But it's scary to think of what could happen if such tech becomes accessible to the masses, as tech is wont to do. If you can identify anyone whose face you can photograph in the street, then you could also harass them, blackmail them or stalk them. Imagine, for example, a woman going into an abortion clinic being photographed, tracked down and harassed by anti-abortion activists.
Once the article has sort of addressed the multiple ethical issues surrounding facial recognition tech, it shifts towards portraying Ton-That as just a regular guy presiding over a company built on web-scraping that has now amassed several billion data points on internet users all over the world.
He had a nice apartment. He's soft-spoken. He's dressed appropriately for an interview with a major press outlet. That's the sort of stuff we're treated to, as though Ton-That would be stupid enough to techbro the interview by blowing cigar smoke at a journalist while dressed like Affliction Apparel's last remaining customer.
Given all the controversy - and the reluctance of even much maligned Big Tech to employ it - I half expect to find Ton-That, 35, stroking a cat like a Bond villain or perhaps laughing maniacally when I arrive to meet him in his publicist's home office. But he sits in a butterscotch-coloured armchair strumming a guitar, wearing a very non-threatening suit - it's ultra-calming Baker-Miller pink - with white Nike trainers. He is disarmingly polite, boyish and low-key, with long black hair that has an odd grey streak and rimless glasses.
Ton-That has also made sure the stuff he shows journalists highlights the less-questionable uses of his tech.
Items have been laid out for my benefit: memorabilia and framed letters from generals from Ton-That's trip to Ukraine in April. Clearview gave its technology to the Ukraine war effort last year, using a database of more than 2 billion images from Russian social media sites for war crime investigations, identifying missing children, even for dead bodies on the battlefield", Ton-That tells me.
That's the upsell of a CEO who runs a company whose reputation has been run into the ground by its business model and its constant lack of recognition (ironic) that the business model is unlikely to appeal to anyone but sociopaths. The number of ethical quandaries recognized by Ton-That (that would be zero") is far outpaced by the number of privacy law-related suits it has lost, countries it has been kicked out of, and dollars owed to said countries for blatantly violating local laws.
Despite this, Ton-That continues to blame the victims of his business model, and does so in paragraph that directly undercuts the company you've never heard of" assertions made by the headline.
Ton-That's Clearview has become the most famous of facial recognition projects, known for its giant database of 30 billion images, which have been scraped" from news and employment sites, and social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter) and Venmo (an American mobile payments service used by 75 million people last year). That is controversial, because the vast majority of those in the photographs have not given consent for their images to be collected. Ton-That argues that the sites the images are scraped from are all public. Our search engines are going to keep collecting public information that's out there," he says. He calls it the open internet".
Hey, if you don't want your personal info and photos scraped, just don't get online. That's the excuse being made here by the only company that thinks this is an ok thing to do. And that's followed (after a few more paragraphs about Clearview's usefulness in identifying pedophiles and January 6th insurrectionists) by Ton-That's admission that his product is likely illegal pretty much everywhere.
He also says that a true copycat would be unlikely, if you look at the global regulatory landscape", and because of the difficulties of the technicalities.
Difficulties of the technicalities" means the nonconsensual scraping of internet users' photos and data not only violates most sites' terms of service, but also the large number of data privacy laws enacted in the US and around the world over the last decade.
And there are other disturbing details handed to the reporter, like this one:
But the thing that really astounds me is that it can identify an eight-year-old child from a baby photo.
Instead of pressing Ton-That on his system's ability to provide customers with immense amounts of power, the reporter opts to present those concerned with the negative side effects as non-serious people.
This is the sort of detail that has privacy campaigners quaking in their boots...
Maybe this loses something in the translation from the King's English to ours, but this belittles people who are actually trying to prevent government contractors like Clearview from capitalizing on the expansion of the surveillance state, as well as enact privacy laws that actually, you know, respect user privacy.
And there's nothing in this that suggests Clearview won't head down the road paved by multiple tech companies far more interested in market expansion than steering clear of abusive government.
His plans for expansion are, he says, to focus on US law enforcement. There are still a lot of customers there, Ton-That says, up to 18,000 police forces. He does muse, though, on whether Clearview could ever be a $10 billion - 8 billion - company (he says it could easily" be a $1 billion company; it was valued at $130 million in July 2021), which would suggest a need for other revenue streams. Given the legal situation in much of Europe, Canada and Australia, I wonder if he means other countries. He says they would not sell to China, Iran or Russia, anyone who is sanctioned or partially sanctioned by the United States", though I have seen reports online that Clearview is targeting other countries with significant human rights issues. I ask him if he is working with Brazil, Colombia, Nigeria, UAE, Qatar or Singapore. We don't have anything to announce at this time," he says, which, on my request for further clarification, becomes, No comment."
The best part of this profile piece comes at the end. Despite the soft sell of Ton-That's ability to not entirely resemble a super-villain, his interview at least prompts the reporter to engage in some social media account clean-up efforts, even if these efforts are likely futile.
In any case, afterwards, knowing that they will be searchable for ever, even as they age, I delete any images that show the front of my kids' faces on Instagram, though I fear it may be too late - they may already be saved on some database. And what happens if a little kid - captured on his doting parents' social media now - joins a protest 30 years in the future, in a more authoritarian time, and they are betrayed by a long-ago image, by the merest sliver of side profile?
That's what Ton-That wants. I mean, he doesn't want interviewers to become so rattled by his product, they start deleting photos. But he does appear to want to create a massive database that not only spans billions of people, but gives customers the ability to access their entire lives, both past and present. The fact that Ton-That - as impeccably dressed as he is - can be talked into a no comment" corner so easily shows he's well aware he's pushing a garbage product that will be most appreciated by garbage governments and garbage government agencies. Sure, he may not look and behave like a super-villain in person, but his product is a surveillance wet dream most of us never imagined would ever be brought to life by anyone other than dark web-located cyber-criminals.